Can B2B Telephone Campaigns Still Lead to Growth? Glad You Asked!

Have you ever tried to get new business  by “cold calling” prospects on the phone? What about calling customers to see about their current or future needs? Or calling into a new market to gain intelligence about its potential?

Maybe you’ve thought about doing these things, or others, but just didn’t know where to start. Here are our thoughts on what to keep in mind, whether you create and conduct a campaign yourself or use outside resources. The most basic of the basics is that calling campaigns work.

The critical thing in any direct marketing effort is to manage expectations about the outcome, positive and negative. The bad news is that “response rates” in direct marketing are low. And the proliferation in communications channels in the past decade hasn’t helped to improve those rates. In calling campaigns, a response means someone talks with you about the reason for your call or responds to a message. Another term that’s sometimes used is “conversion,” which means making a sale: you’ve converted a prospect into a customer.

The good news  is that the fundamentals still apply, regardless of the channel. In selling, for example, even with response and conversion rates under one percent, a calling campaign can still be worthwhile. In fact, the ROI can be quite high, especially when long-term customer value is figured in. If the right product or service is being sold to the right market, gaining even one new client can be profitable. It doesn’t matter whether getting that client takes 100 or even 200 calls.

In 27 years of providing business development services, we’ve learned that a cold-calling campaign requires persistence and consistency. Success largely depends on these factors:

· How much prospects believe they need the product or service offering

· The quality and qualification of the database—that is, calling the right companies and people

· How satisfied they are with the product or service they’re  currently  using

· Whether mail or e-mail marketing has “softened the ground” beforehand

· Brand awareness and perception

· The effectiveness of competitor marketing

· Whether there is an “offer” associated with responding to a call

· How quickly the calling firm follows with everyone who wants to hear more—the “hand-raisers.”

Even if the primary purpose of your campaign isn’t achieved, market intelligence gained in the process can be valuable. Databases can be updated, job changes of key buyers, managers, and executives identified, new information about innovations or market shifts discovered. Over time, simply making your marketplace more aware of your brand—“getting your name out”—will no doubt prove valuable.

Recently, in an effort to gain new professional service firm supporters for a not-for-profit and to better understand the market, our firm conducted an outbound calling campaign in a specific state. Here’s a brief look at the process and summary of what happened and, most important, what we learned that can help the organization increase support in the target state and others. (Another point in favor of calling campaigns: results can be extrapolated to other initiatives that don’t even involve calling.)

We began with a list  of top professional service firms in the major metro areas and eliminated those not meeting key points in the profile. After developing a more targeted list, we learned from websites and making “recon” calls to selected prospects that some other firms on the list wouldn’t be good prospects for other reasons.

Of the remaining firms, our calling identified several who “raised their hands” to learn more. Our client’s leadership made follow-up calls quickly—a critical success factor—but did not gain other conversations or conversions. An important piece of information we identified late in the process, however, can be used in future campaigns. In fact, it’s so important that we’ll open our calls with it to raise stronger interest more quickly. And we’ll advise our client to lead with it on follow-up calls. We’ve seen other instances of critical marketplace insights surface in calling campaigns and become highly productive in other initiatives.

Another valuable insight  was that a broader geographic scope would identify more, interested prospects, expanding the campaign’s target market. That kind of information can increase response rates but can best be gained by contacting prospects directly, in this case by calling. Such knowledge can be the basis for large and sustainable ROIs on campaigns.

What You Can Do:  Determine how many new customers or clients your company has secured in the past three to five years. Calculate the revenue from each and the likely lifetime value. Identify how those customers became customers (the “channels”). Were they referrals? Trade show follow-ups? “Walk-ins” from internet searches? Then identify demographic commonalities to help build databases.

Next, ask yourself: Are we dissatisfied with the number of new clients or amount of revenue? Have they come from just one or two channels or consistently from a small number of partners?

If the answer to either of those questions is “yes,”  asking one more question is essential: how can we expand the number of channels or the number of partners bringing in business? A different marketing or business development approach might be the answer. And, yes, one of those growth-creating tactics could be one or more telephone campaigns.

We provide several calling-based and other lead-generation programs, primarily for business-to-business clients. And we offer calling to do market research, follow-up that you don’t have time for, audience-discovery calls—telephone focus groups, in other words—and other services

To raise your hand to learn more,  just call us at 847-446-0008, Ext. 1, or e-mail  pkrone@productivestrategies.com. We’d love to hear about your challenges and opportunities.